Halfway through the '60s, Hollywood was floundering its way trying to get in sync with and, more importantly in the studios' little bottom-line mind, trying to exploit the revolutionary tide of the times which emboldened that decade to consider itself the epiphany of the century.

Writer Robert Towne chuckles at a question about how young the executives in Hollywood are these days, how short the institutional memory about great work of the past is -- and whether that has an impact on getting his phone calls returned.